In the Process of Becoming: The Millions Interviews Amina Cain

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I first encountered Amina Cain’s writing with her first book of short stories, I Go to Some Hollow, published by Les Figues Press. I remember impressions—her laconic precision and distinct voice, which have continued to evolve in her second book, Creature, and in her novel, Indelicacy, just published by FSG.

Cain’s writing is succinct in a way that conjures Dickinson or Duras, with her swift and deliberate delivery. Reading Indelicacy feels like inhabiting a painting. Or to play with the metaphor that writing a book is like building a house, my experience of reading Amina Cain is akin to wandering through a series of exquisite rooms where I’m surprised by a decisively placed fixture or an oblique passageway. They are rooms I’d like to return to again and again.

Indelicacy’s protagonist Vitória is a writer and a former cleaning woman, who was rescued from her job when she married. She is concerned with note-taking and observation, and with the authenticity in her life. Just as Vitória is seeking, so is this novel in asking what it means to be free, to think, to be true to oneself. This quandary of being and becoming is quite the opposite of self-help: Vitória is indelicate and self possessed. For example, she tells her former employer, who is quite cold to her, that he is “Like a tooth that hasn’t been brushed in years and is growing hair.”

Vitória’s solitude without loneliness is a quality I’ve considered quite a bit over the last month as the following conversation with Cain has evolved, and even more so now that we are living mostly isolated within our homes during a pandemic. Here in Chicago, all events are canceled and establishments closed, and I am thrust into a solitude that Vitória makes her companion. Or rather, Vitória is not lonely when she chooses her solitude. When wandering alone and when writing in her room, she becomes visible. As she notes at the end of the novel, “in the process of becoming, the soul makes room.”

The Millions: I’ll begin with a remark that seems as true—having just reread Indelicacy—as it did when I first read the novel. I experienced a kind of synesthesia when reading, each word and image so precise, each action so clear, sentences came together as a portrait, a landscape, an emotion. This novel feels as close to art as a novel can. And I mean “art” in many ways, but I’ll start with it in the sense that reading Indelicacy somehow made me feel that I’m wandering within a painting, and at times like I’m walking through rooms.

Vitória, cleaning woman and writer at heart, takes note of multiple works of art both as she cleans the museum and upon reflection, but her notes are almost like an accent within the larger picture. When reading I also started thinking of similarities and stark contrasts with Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, where the Adam passed days gazing at paintings in the Prado; it’s so beautifully written but also so masculine and privileged, whereas Indelicacy is gorgeous but spare, and Vitória dwells amongst paintings as she cleans.

I could say more, but for fear of saying too much, I’d rather ask you about the influence art as had on your writing, and this novel in particular. How were you thinking of approaching feminine vs. masculine approaches to making art? Were you thinking of maintenance art and labor versus emotional labor? It seems, too, privilege and gender intermingle, so I’d be curious to hear your thoughts about that as well, with regard to Indelicacy.

Amina Cain: It’s wonderful the images came through to you in that way, precise and clear. I want them to be. I like that you felt you were wandering in a painting, and sometimes through rooms. And if the novel, for you, feels close to art, then I am happy. I’ve wanted that too.

Art has had a huge influence on my writing, starting with the time I spent at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, when I was in college, working for two years at the information desk and coat check. I had never spent so much time at an art center before, and it was formative. I remember discovering Essex Hemphill and seeing the film Tongues Untiedby Marlon Riggs, a huge show on Fluxus, a concert by Diamanda Galas, a dance performance by Bill T. Jones. Though I majored in Women’s Studies, I worked at the Wexner Center at the same time that I started writing, and now the fact of this seems meaningful.

For graduate school, I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was surrounded by art and artists. As students, we were given free admission to the Art Institute (which is one of my favorite museums of all time; in fact, it inspired the museum in Indelicacy), and for two years I went there every week. I remember seeing Bill Viola’s work for the first time at his retrospective there, which changed me as a writer. I felt then that I wanted to do in writing what Viola was doing in video and installation. I’ve felt the same looking at paintings by Amy Rathbone and Carravaggio and Bruegel, and experiencing the work of Kara Walker, Marina Abramović, Yinka Shonibare, Sarah Conaway, and Alex Branch, in the films of Laida Lertxundi and Alicia Scherson, in sound and animation by Todd Mattei, in the music of Coco Rosie, Josephine Foster, and Antony and the Johnsons.

When I was working on Indelicacy, I don’t know that I was thinking consciously of feminine versus masculine approaches to art making, but subconsciously I obviously was, and that’s my favorite kind of thinking anyway. And the novel is subsumed in “female” experience, the experiences of the narrator, as well as her friends, Dana and Antoinette, and their art making. It feels tricky, because I don’t think I can say what female experience even is, and though I’ve written about women, I don’t want to set up binaries, gender and otherwise. But I know that the book has nothing to do with male experience or art making, and in it I poke fun at men a lot, though my narrator likes art by men, as do I.

Labor (of all kinds) is an oppressive force in the book, in that it so often tries to define who a person is, circumscribes their life, and, in the worst case scenario, is abusive. And privilege is entwined in this in terms of class. My narrator is suspicious of men, but also of other women, the ones to whom she’s made invisible because she is poor. When she herself has money, she sees the same thing happen to Antoinette, who is still without it.

TM: One of the pleasures of reading Indelicacy for me is the centrality of the female friendships. However, for Vitória and Dana especially, their relationship to art—writing and dancing, respectively—is arguably the central relationship for each woman. I don’t perceive their engagement with each other or their art as a pushback against the masculine, but rather, something organic and specific to their friendships, related to the power of this attention. In this vein, Indelicacy seems to be a kindred spirit with Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which portrays female friendships and a love affair in an age in France that predates telephones (I believe it’s the 18th century) — this also mirrors a timeless quality in Indelicacy. In a post-screening interview, Sciamma answered questions and she stated she had wanted to make her film, in part, to depict the process of a woman making art.

Vitória is defined and thus defines herself by a need to write, and I’m so curious to hear more about your sense of her writing as a vocation, as a way to live. I know Joan Didion famously once said that she writes in order to know what she’s seeing and thinking and to know what it means. I feel like Vitória might say something similar but different—in that she writes and thinks about art in order to live. Can you talk about this in regard to Vitória’s becoming, and her becoming visible, and also her invisibility you mentioned earlier?

Vitoria also comments that reading certain books enhances her desire to write, and that she writes in part to keep them in conversation. With this in mind, what books and texts have you found a similar desire to write strengthened, and that you write to in response?

AC: Definitely. For Vitória, looking at and thinking and writing about art is not only what makes her feel alive, but what she forms her life around. I feel similarly to Didion, that I write to see what is inside my mind, but Vitória is coming to art for the first time, and to heightened experience, and writing is a way of interacting with both, which is also a way of living. It is how she becomes herself. I don’t know if it makes her more visible to others; in a way it is an invisible vocation, and she is rarely acknowledged by others in this pursuit. Certainly not by her husband, or “her” maid, Solange. It’s part of why her friendships with Antoinette and Dana are so important—they see each other as they really are. It is a wonderful thing, to be seen by someone, and to see them in return. It doesn’t always happen.

I just saw Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and that makes sense to me—that Sciamma in part wanted to show a woman making art. I like the scenes in which we’re watching Marianne draw. And there’s a particular scene in the kitchen, when the three young women are in front of the fire, with chopped vegetables on the table and flowers in a vase: it looks like a scene from a painting.

TM: I’m curious about the novel’s title, Indelicacy, which is so cunning—what what led you to it? I sense it’s related to Vitória’s perspective—she’s strong-willed and independent, gloriously and hopelessly herself; but she’s also very attuned to beauty and elegance within the museum and in the world. When dining on Christmas eve, Antoinette’s small careful bites make Vitória “want to eat like a pig.” Or there’s the way she has an outburst after enduring a self-indulgent conversation between two male authors, and she calls them both worms: “When you open your mouths you are male worms eating from a toilet.” I love this line, so angry and unexpected and quite indelicate. Is indelicacy for Vitória a source of pride? A reaction against expectation? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, and on indelicacy in general.

AC: Yes, I would say so: indelicacy as a source of pride, and a reaction against expectation, certainly. It is how she pushes back against who and what she perceives as trying to keep her in her “place.” She likes to upset the status quo in her own way, and she has a certain bluntness when it comes to people she sees as privileged. She is judgmental, and in that way I think she might be the daughter of Sei Shōnagon, with Shōnagon’s endless lists of the things she hates in The Pillow Book.

It took me quite a while to get to the title. In general, titles aren’t easy for me. There’s a line in the novel when Vitória says of herself: “how indelicate,” and my husband said, why not Indelicacy? It made such sense. In addition to the fact that being indelicate is partly how Vitória finds her freedom, it’s a word that isn’t used as much as it once was, which seems apropos to the novel. And a word used to insult suffragettes!

TM: What does freedom mean to Vitória? Her marriage is and isn’t a form of entrapment—she relocates when she marries and is able still to write and see art, but her husband doesn’t understand her devotion to writing. Is she captive because she’s estranged from herself?

And when she ends her marriage, Vitória goes on a self-imposed exile. How is this sense of becoming distinct for her, must she be alone to sit with her thoughts? There’s such a meditative quality to this book, in her existential focus—I’m curious what becoming and being free mean to Vitória, and also how does this freedom relate to meeting one’s fate, as articulated in the epigraph, taken rom Clarice Lispector’s The Apple in the Dark: “It’s as if something that should happen is waiting for me…it’s something that owes itself to me, it looks like me, it’s almost myself. But it never gets close. You can call it fate if you want. Because I’ve tried to go out and meet it.”

AC: Freedom means everything to her, and in a way it’s what drives the whole book. I’d say it’s not so much that she needs to be alone in order to write, as much as she needs to feel that she is living authentically, close to the things that have meaning to her, that make her feel she is becoming who she was meant to be. Freedom means being herself, whatever that looks like.

For awhile it makes sense for her to be married; she finds great freedom within that institution because she has time to write, and money that allows her to go to dance classes and concerts, and buy pretty clothes and objects, all of which make her want to write. But it doesn’t last, and it isn’t enough, and to spend her life in that way feels false. She says she has no vision for it. To go away alone is an impulse she feels and then follows, to give everything to her writing, but even that isn’t perfect. She is figuring out how to have the life she wants; it may always be a work in progress. Like the Lispector epigraph, she is trying to go out and meet something in herself; she doesn’t want to block it. But what does it mean to never quite meet one’s fate, to get close, but not come right up against it? For me, it is one of the central questions of the book.

TM: Vitória encounters a gallery of unfinished works, filled with empty space—and she reflects “Why is empty space a comfort and a relief?…Empty space remains empty, always. And for a little while a small part of me can be empty too.” Does Vitória’s relief come from feeling the presence of others too strongly? Is writing a way for her to empty herself? Your prose is so beautifully pared back and illustrative—in what ways are you mindful of emptiness when writing, and what is your relationship to emptiness or the unfinished?

AC: I think writing is a way for Vitória to empty herself, and to fill herself too. Since she is becoming who she is through her relationship to looking at art, and to writing, and both sort of purge everything else, all the things that aren’t important to her fall away. Without them, she can see herself, and everything around her, more clearly. There is room; she can breathe. That is where the relief comes in. As a writer, I’m always thinking about how to empty out a text so I can see (what remains) more clearly too, with the hope that this will be true for the reader as well. As to the idea of the unfinished, I think it’s the true nature of things, that we are always “becoming,” never finished. There’s something nice in a text or an object or a person that appears polished and neat, but there is also something appealing about one that wears its changing nature on its sleeve.

Anne K. Yoder
is a staff writer for The Millions. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in Fence, Bomb, and Tin House, among other publications. She currently lives in Chicago, where she's at work on a novel. Read more of her work here: http://annekyoder.tumblr.com.

Even a slight familiarity with pop culture provides the awareness that Scandinavian crime stories are ascendant — due in part to Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s internationally bestselling trilogy. There are, of course, numerous other practitioners of the crime genre from ice-bound precincts — Åke Edwardson, Karin Fossum, Anne Holt, Camilla Läckberg, Henning Mankell, husband and wife team Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö and Arnaldur Indriðason, and so on.

Norwegian Jo Nesbø, whose CV includes stints as a stock trader, cab driver, musician, and soccer player, has seen six novels featuring his driven and single minded Oslo homicide detective, Harry Hole, published in English translation. Harry likes jazz, ’80s rock, booze, and solving crimes. And, naturally, Hole resents and resists authority — a burdensome characteristic for a big city policeman. All of which produces entertaining and, dare I offer, suspenseful reading.

In our face-to-face chat we talked about American crime writers, Nesbø’s ineptitude as a taxi driver, who is making a movie from his book, Lord of the Flies, his reading habits and more:

RB: Sound’s like it. There’s a hard sound at the end. And Harry Hole is pronounced how?

JN: Same thing — outside Norway I am happy with Harry Hole and so is he, but in Norway it’s Hahree Whoule.

RB: Since your book is translated, it must be first written in Norwegian, yes?

JN: Absolutely.

RB: When you think about American crime fiction, there are a number of icons that people around the world refer to — Chandler, Hammett, Cain, and Thomson. Is there someone like that in Norway?

JN: Yeah, you have [Henrik] Wergeland. [He] is recognized as the godfather of Norwegian crime literature. In Scandinavian crime you have to go to the ’70s — Maj Sjöwall andPer Wahlöö founded the modern Scandinavian crime novel based on social criticism.

RB: And more procedural.

JN: It was. So everyone in Scandinavia who writes a crime novel, whether they l know it or not, they are influenced by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö.

RB: You have a varied CV — how did you come to writing?

JN: Um.

RB: You were a stockbroker, a rock and roller, soccer player, taxi driver.

JN: I was a really bad taxi driver. I was famous for it.

RB: Bad sense of direction or poor driving?

JN: Just bad driving. Lack of concentration. But I come from a book reading home. My mother was a librarian. My father was a book collector. And so he would always be reading. So I started reading as soon as I could tell the letters [of the alphabet]. The first novel that I made my father read to me was Lord of The Flies by William Golding. A Nobel Prize winner. I wish I could say I chose that book because I have good taste, but I liked the cover. It was a pig’s head on a stake. Actually, when I wrote my first novel at the age of 37, none of my friends were surprised that I had finally written a novel. They were more like, “What took you so long?” It took some time, but it came very naturally.

RB: I am a little confused. There are eight novels in the Harry Hole series and four have been published in the U.S. [there are actually six available, with a seventh on the way in fall 2012]?

JN: I’m a bit confused myself. Because the first two novels feature Harry Hole in Australia and then in Bangkok, Thailand. And when we started selling the rights abroad we decided we would not sell the rights to the first two novels because they were a bit far-fetched — a Norwegian detective in Australia and Thailand. So we started with the third novel, but then the U.K. and later on the U.S. decided they would publish them out of order. So it is a bit confusing. Not only are they out of order, but also they are in different print sequences in different countries.

JN: That’s right. That was their opening line when they phoned me. Because I had turned down offers for the Harry Hole series for a long time. Not that I don’t love movies, but they’re so strong compared to novels, so I wanted to keep that universe untouched. But they phoned me with a great opening line — “Hi, we are Working Title and we made Fargo.” (both laugh) And so I said, “OK, I’m listening.”

RB: Why did they mention Fargo, of all their films?

JN: I think they had a hunch that I liked that movie. It was probably on my top 10 list of movies ever.

RB: That’s great. I always have liked them, but I gained a lot of respect for them in the way they re-made True Grit.

JN: I just saw the first part of True Grit on the plane — I hadn’t seen it. And the dialogue was great. And I was curious because I hadn’t seen the original and it was really whippy great dialogue. It reminded me of Deadwood. Different, but still with great attention to dialogue.

JN: I didn’t know there was a novel. Is it written in the same, almost Shakespearean way?

RB: Dexter is a great American writer, most well known for Paris Trout.

JN: I’m so ignorant.

RB: Is this your first visit here?

JN: No, I was here two years ago [for a book tour] and I was here before that. My father grew up in New York, in Brooklyn, with my grandparents. So I have some ties and bonds with the U.S.

RB: Besides gruesome deaths, what would define and distinguish Scandinavian crime literature? As opposed to American?

JN: Hopefully, Scandinavian crime has — the quality is good. You do have bad Scandinavian crime lit — but I think what separates it from not only American, but the rest of Europe also, is there is a tradition stemming from the ’70s that it was OK to write crime literature. It was prestigious. Sjöwall and Wahlöö sort of moved the crime novel from the kiosks into the bookstores, meaning that young talented writers would use the crime novel as vehicles for their storytelling talents. And so you have had good crime novelists, good writers, who would, from time to time, write so-called serious literature and almost all the well-known, established serious writers in Scandinavia have at one time written a crime novel. It’s sort of a thing that you do. You must have a go at genre.

RB: Here it seems acceptance of genre fiction as legitimate has come later. Elmore Leonard is championed, by among others Martin Amis, Michael Connelly, and George Pelecanos.

JN:James Lee Burke.

RB: I have read three of your books — and you have avoided what I think is the reason I don’t read series. Harry Hole is not predictable and clichéd. You know some of his habits, but the plots aren’t cookie cutter. What’s on your mind when you write the next Hole story? When are you done with him — how old does he get to be?

JN: That’s a secret.

RB: You know?

JN: I know — I have a storyline for him. He is not going to have eternal life. And he is not going to rise from the dead. So after the second novel, I sat down and wrote his story — I am not 100 percent sure how many books there will be, but if we are not near the end, we are nearer the end.

RB:Philip Kerr, who has written seven Bernie Gunther novels, says that the problem with writing a series is that the author usually writes one or two too many. They don’t know when to stop. Will you know when to stop?

JN: I don’t know. (laughs) I have no idea. Hopefully somebody will tell me. As long as the books sell, probably they won’t.

RB: Sales and quality don’t necessarily correspond.

JN: Actually, I think that — I am reading Jim Thompson on the plane. He had to write to pay the rent. I am so lucky I don’t have to write. I don’t have to sell books. So I can focus on what I want to do — what’s interesting. Do I know when to stop? Yes. It will not be decided by sales numbers. From the start I wrote for myself and two friends that I wanted to impress — two friends that had more or less the same taste in culture. And it’s still the same. Those are the two guys I am writing for — they don’t know this. If they say, “I read the last book and it was OK, then I am over the moon.”

RB: OK is good?

JN: OK is great.

RB: Do you have first readers?

JN: Yah, at the publishing house.

RB: But not friends?

JN: No, nothing like that. I have four or five people at the publisher. They coordinate their opinions and we sit down and have a meeting.

RB: Chandler was in the same situation as Thompson — so it goes. So, there is a limit to the Harry Hole. Are you already thinking about other fiction that you want to write?

JN: I am.

RB: How far ahead are you in your aspirations and goals?

JN: Other series or novels? I don’t like to think that long term. The problem is that I have more ideas than I have time. So I have — I am 51 now. I probably won’t be able to read all the books I want to read. And I won’t have the time to write all the books I want to write. So I try to give them the right priority, meaning that— — I have a children’s book series that I am working on now. There will be one more book in that series. And then a stand-alone children’s book. And then I will finish the Harry Hole series. I have some ideas for maybe a new series. I haven’t quite decided yet because I want to write this stand-alone thriller. When you write, it’s important to do it while you have the enthusiasm for the idea. Maybe the most important period of your writing is when you are convinced that your idea is the best idea any writer ever has had. So you have to use that energy, because the time will come when you wake up in the morning and you will doubt your idea. And then it’s good that you have already more than half–

RB: That doesn’t happen when you start something?

JN: Not when I start. And it doesn’t really happen that often. I wake up in the morning unsure. It did happen two years ago. I had been working on a novel for a long time and I started doubting. I went to my publishers and they were quite happy with it. But they had some suggestions and I immediately knew that they read it the way I read it myself. And what I did was delete the whole novel. Two years’ work out the window. Like I said, I am in the fortunate situation that I don’t have to publish books to pay the rent.

RB: It sounds like you don’t encounter writer’s block.

JN: No, I never experienced writer’s block, no.

RB: Do you have to write every day?

JN: I try to write every day, and I can write almost anywhere. I have been writing on the plane coming here. I thought our meeting was at four o’clock, so I was planning to write for an hour. When we are done here, I am going to write for two hours before my next meeting.

RB: Sounds like you love it.

JN: I love it. I started writing so late in life. I was 37 — I had worked, as you said, as a taxi driver, a stockbroker. A fishing trawler. I had many kinds of jobs. And I know this is the greatest job that you can have. To actually get up in the morning and people are paying you to do what you really want to do. To come up with these stories. It’s unbelievable having that as a job.

RB: Do you go for periods without writing?

JN: I don’t. Not really. Like I said I have more ideas than I have time. When I am going on vacation with my daughter for a week, she says, “Daddy, don’t bring the laptop, ok?.” I say, “No, no, no, I won’t.” Like an alcoholic, I will have it hidden somewhere. No, I have one week a year that is sort of sacred, that I don’t write.

RB: Can you imagine not writing?

JN: I can. I had a long life not writing, so I can imagine. But it would a poor life, that’s for sure.

RB: What is life like for a successful writer in Norway — do you live in Oslo? Is there a literary circle?

JN: I live in Oslo and there is a literary circle. I guess I am not part of it. I never was. I have my friends before I started writing and I stick with them. We hang out and do things.

RB: No publishing parties and movie openings?

JN: Not really. I probably did that more when I was a musician. And you get tired of it — talking about books, talking about writing. I do that enough when I am traveling. It’s good to go back home and go rock climbing or just talk about Bob Dylan — anybody but me. When I first started talking about myself at interviews like this, I though this must be the best job ever. To have people absolutely listening to you, talking about yourself for hours and hours. So I was a bit surprised when after a couple of years I felt I was getting tired of myself. Listening to my own voice, retelling the story of my life.

RB: Answering the same questions–

JN: You know this interview is a bit better than most–

RB: Well, thank you. Is there a big boom in writing programs, MFA programs in Scandinavia as in the U.S?

JN: Ah, yah. Something happened in the ’90s that suddenly writers became pop stars. They started being interviewed on talk shows and they started having their own shows called Book Box — there was an old building in Oslo where they had an indoor pool. They started interviewing writers there. They were like rock concerts. Actually, they had rock concerts in the same arena. It would be sold out — just for a writer being interviewed for 45 minutes. Ever since that, all the young talented people, they want to become famous writers because they would be treated like pop stars.

RB: What is the book business like in your part of the world? Is it prospering?

JN: It is. Norway — I am not sure about Sweden and Denmark, but Norway is one of the best countries in the world to be a writer. Both economically and artistically. I just went to France and I asked a bookseller there, “How many writers can write full time?” He said, “Probably, 50 or 60.” In Norway there are probably 200. Which has a smaller population — smaller than Massachusetts — 4 or 5 million.

RB: Which Americans do you try to read? How do they filter into Norway?

JN: I guess European literature has traditionally been more important in Norway than American. But myself, maybe because my father grew up here, I was influenced by American literature from a young age. Mark Twain, who I still regard as one of the great American writers. And Ernest Hemingway. Later on I read the Beatniks — Jack Kerouac. I was a great fan of Charles Bukowski.

RB: And contemporary novelists?

JN: Michael Connelly. James Lee Burke. There are so many greats. I didn’t read that much crime fiction before I started writing it myself. I can remember reading Lawrence Block. Dennis Lehane, of course. His Mystic River. I went to Asia and I bought 10 crime novels that were supposed to be good. Out of the 10, I found one good book — which was Mystic River.

RB: There is another Bostonian, Chuck Hogan [The Town] who is excellent. And there is [the late great] George Higgins who wrote The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Do you know it?

JN: No.

RB: It’s also a great movie with Robert Mitchum. You are here for an extensive charm initiative?

JN: I will be here for nine days, trying to charm as many [people] as I can. Toronto, NYC, and the West Coast.

RB: By the way, how is it that your father grew up here?

JN: My grandmother left Norway for the U.S. when she was 16 and then she went back and met my grandfather. They made my daddy. And they went back to Brooklyn. To a part of Brooklyn where you had many Scandinavians in the ’20s and ’30s.

RB: Do you watch crime movies?

JN: I do. When I started writing I was probably more influenced by crime movies based on novels than the original novel. In some cases the films are better than the novels. The Godfather is probably a better movie–

JN: Yes. I have seen it and it’s great. The most interesting thing happening in storytelling right now is probably in American TV series. Breaking Bad—

RB:Justified based on an Elmore Leonard character — pretty funny. Are there original serials like that in Norway?

JN: We do, but with a small population and limited resources — there is a Danish series that made its way at least to the U.K. It’s called The Crime.

RB: It’s called The Killing here. A female cop tries to solve the killing of a young girl–

JN: That’s it. Are you seeing the original series?

RB: No, it must be made for the U.S. It’s in English and set in Seattle using American actors.

JN: Yah, the original is shot in Copenhagen. It’s great, if you can get it. It has subtitles.

RB: When I saw The Wire, I never saw it in episodes — I got the DVD and watched four or five hours at a time. It seems counterintuitive to watch these long stories a piece at a time.

JN: I agree. Watching the DVDs is like books, you decide when to consume the story. But don’t forget Charles Dickens would serialize his stories.

RB: Who knew the difference then? What is it, a new phenomenon?

JN: I think he was the first one who did it — if not, it was unusual to do that. I heard he would receive letters from his readers advising him how the story should go. And he would actually listen to them.

RB: Dickens was fascinating character. I’ve read a few novels where he actually appears as a character — Richard Flanagan’sWanting and Joseph O Connor’sStar of the Sea. What kind of music do you like — jazz appears a lot in the Hole books?

JN: Jazz and American rock from the ’80s. I still play about 50 to 60 gigs a year. I play guitar and I sing. So most of the gigs are with my bass player. We also go touring with my old band. We are going touring this summer — just for a few festivals. Just for fun. We keep the tour short enough so we don’t kill each other (laughs). So we are having fun.

RB: Do you tour outside Norway?

JN: No, the lyrics are in Norwegian and I don’t think the music makes sense outside Norway.

RB: Who comes to Norway to play? Anyone big?

JN: Most of them — either to Oslo or Stockholm or to Copenhagen — which is not so far from where I live in Oslo.

RB: Do you travel in Scandinavia?

JN: The land is more or less the same — just different dialects.

RB: Danish is understandable?

JN: No you have to read Danish. They speak funny. Actually, and I love Danes, but Danish is difficult. Children all over the world learn their mother tongue at the same age except for one country — Denmark. It takes a little longer.

RB: Apparently Dutch is unpronounceable by anyone except the Dutch. That’s how the Dutch Resistance tripped up spies in World War II. So will you participate in the making of the Harry Hole movie?

JN: The deal is done. I am an executive producer. I have a veto when it comes to the director and screenwriter. And that was what was important to me. I wasn’t too eager to sell the rights for the books as long as I was writing the series. So that was a condition — that I would have veto. The first time we met they said, “We can’t do it like that. We can’t go to Martin Scorsese and ask him to write a screenplay for this unknown Norwegian writer and if he likes it then maybe this unknown Norwegian writer will say yes. And have you direct the movie.” I said, “I completely understand but that is my condition. I am happy not to have the series filmed, yet.”

RB: Is it difficult that once the film is made there will be a tangible character and so when you write–

JN: That was one of the reasons I wasn’t eager to have it filmed, you know. I‘d rather there be a 1,000 Harry Holes in the heads of my readers than one character defining him.

RB: Having said that, who do you think may be a good Harry Hole?

JN: I have no idea.

RB: Norwegian or American?

JN: I have been thinking hard — Nick Nolte is probably too old. But I have no idea.

RB: Do you like Harry Hole?

JN: I do. He is a bit annoying at times. But most of the time I like him.

RB: Because he comes through — for truth, justice, and the Norwegian way?

JN: I mean he is irritating. He always has to do things the difficult way. He can’t ever — he has this problem with authority. And in my opinion he should try to avoid authority more, instead of always picking a fight. He’s a bit annoying in that sense. He is not the kind of guy I would like to hang out with — he is a bit too intense.

RB: He doesn’t really have any friends. One guy — his tech guy; he is sort of a friend. Even his colleagues who seem to respect him don’t gravitate to him. He is a tough cookie. His girlfriend obviously has problems with him.

JN: I think women want to save him more than that he is pleasant to be around. But he has one childhood friend — the hard drinking taxi driver. Apart from that, a psychologist and women.

RB: Often in crime stories, the crimes are not that important. Certainly in Raymond Chandler, in The Big Sleep who could figure that one out. Or in Chinatown where you are told not to try to understand “because it’s Chinatown.” In the Harry Hole stories, you do plot out a crime and have surprising solutions and endings. It’s something you care about?

JN: Yes. I like the dialogue you have with the reader — I am going to give you a chance to sort out the riddle. And I will give you enough information to solve it. I am not going to give you all the vital information from the last 30 pages. But before that, at least you have a chance. That was what Dennis Lehane did in Mystic River — there was a bit of information in the middle of the book and an experienced reader or writer — you could probably tell, okay, here is the killer.

RB: I liked his standalone novel about the 1919 Boston Police strike, Any Given Day.

JN: Yah, yah.

RB: It mentioned the Great Molasses Flood where a big vat of molasses escaped killing 19 or 20 people and wreaking untold havoc. Robert Parker also wrote a number of series and I thought his best work was a standalone, All Our Yesterdays. Did you read Parker?

JN: No. One American writer I read recently was Richard Matheson’sI am Legend. A great novel — short and to the point. It reminded me of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

RB: When The Road came out, I wasn’t in the mood to read it. But I did read a post-apocalyptic novel by Jim Crace called Pesthouse. Twenty years hence, most of America has been destroyed and survivors are searching for safe areas and viable communities. And of course they encounter obstacles. It came out around the same time as McCarthy’s book and was overshadowed by it. Do you know of Jim Crace?

JN: No. There are so many writers. We been sitting here almost an hour now and you are mentioning well-known writers and I don’t know about them. I probably should be embarrassed, but I am not. There are so many books and we don’t have time to read them all.

RB: It is frustrating. If you read 200 books a year, you still don’t scratch the surface.

JN: How many do you read a year?

RB: I may complete 150.

JN: 150!

RB: I start a lot more. I used to feel bad about not finishing a book. I’m better at that.

JN: I ‘m a slow reader. I read more like 30 a year. It’s a crazy thing — there so many talented writers that you are not going to hear about. That’s why I feel so privileged and lucky to be able to come here after years of writing and have a name in Europe and hopefully some day in the United States. It’s not enough to be good.

RB: Is your backlist available here now? Harper has four, Knopf as two. The others?

JN: The first novels will translated to English next year. Harper will probably keep the backlist.

Like many noted Hungarian writers, László Krasznahorkai has the distinction of being a literary giant in the German-speaking world and an exotic literary curiosity, subject to the fascination of cultists, in the Anglophone world. Americans first encountered at least a hint of his work via the director Béla Tarr, with whom Krasznahorkai has forged a three-decade-long collaboration, beginning with the 1988 film Damnation. Tarr’s meditative epic, the seven-and-a-half hour Satantango (1994), a long-take heavy depiction of a dying collectivist town, was an adaptation of Krasznahorkai’s 1985 novel of the same name. After 27 years, Satantango the novel has finally been translated into English.

Krasznahorkai is a difficult, demanding novelist, whose work is made up of long, seemingly interminable sentences, each of them prose poems in themselves, that push to the very edge of madness. Colm Tóibín writes, “For [Krasznahorkai] the sentence is an act of pure performance — a tense high-wire act, a piece of grave and ambitious vaudeville performed with energy both comic and ironic. But there is also a compacted edge to his prose; he is not interested in language merely for its own sake. Prose for him is a complex vehicle moving through a world both real and surreal with considerable precision and sharpness.” The universe of Satantango is vicious and grim, a buried cackle seems to permeate its air. And yet hints of optimism, of small possibilities of human connection seep into the story. His humanity is Faulknerian.

On the occasion of Satantango’s first appearance in English, Krasznahorkai agreed to answer some questions by email. He wrote his answers in Hungarian. The poet George Szirtes, who translated Satantango as well as two other Krasznahorkai novels, The Melancholy of Resistance (which Tarr adapted in the 2000 film The Werkmeister Harmonies) and War and War, translated his answers.

The Millions: Satantango first appeared in 1985, during the slow-motion collapse of the collectivist system in Hungary. It is now making its first appearance in English translation in 2012, a few months after Hungary officially adopted a new constitution that, among other things, consolidated state power over the media, and declared the country, in terms that would be popular with our own religious right, officially Christian. As tempting as it is for an American reader, would it be a mistake to see premonitions of Hungary’s current political situation in the pages of your novel?

László Krasznahorkai: You will never go wrong anticipating doom in my books, anymore than you’ll go wrong in anticipating doom in ordinary life. But when I wrote this book, that is to say in the early ’80s, I had no idea it would be open to a political reading or even echoed anything in the political world. The idea of a political message in Satantango was as far from my mind as the Soviet empire itself. I was only concerned to explore why everyone around me seemed as sad as the rain falling on Hungary and why I myself was sad, surrounded as I was by such people, in the rain. It may sound odd to say so, but our situation hasn’t really changed. The collapse of the Soviet Empire and the political independence resulting from it gave Hungarians a chance of building a new country — but it was immediately clear to me, among other things, that the real question was how we could build the new with the same old people? So the sadness continued to hang around. Maybe we have a little less rain than before, but that’s all.

TM: The third chapter of Satantango opens with a quotation from a geological book describing Hungary’s ancient underwater past during the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras. The doctor is reading this passage and when he looks up he is surrounded by the simple objects of his own dirty house. Two of your novels that have now appeared in English, The Melancholy of Resistance and Satantango, have moments in which characters try to conceive of their positions within enormous conceptions of space and time. But after thinking of their place in the cosmos, a trick of the brain or a change in their external circumstances reminds them of their place in small Hungarian backwaters. Could either of these novels be transported to other small towns in other cultures?

LK: No, I don’t think so. We could perhaps draw a few parallels but they would be forced: the fact is that each culture produces its own sensitive, fragile, unrepeatable conditions; smells, colors, tastes, objects and moods that seem insignificant but have a character that is all but intangible, though you are probably right, for art, and that includes the novel, has its own powers of evocation so that if I read about an inexpressible air of gloom descending on a filthy bar somewhere in Northern Portugal it conjures in me the kind of melancholy I felt the last time I drained a glass of pálinka in a bar in the south of Hungary. In this way you may arrive at some broad overarching sense of commonality between the inhabitants of Northern Portugal and the south of Hungary even though the common light switch is slightly different in the two countries, and that difference is extremely important and highly significant — but having stressed the difference we must acknowledge that the movement with which the last man in the bar switches the light off is precisely the same in both cases.

TM: Your contemporary Péter Esterházy writes, “The nineteenth-century sentence was long-winded, the meaning wandering through long periodic structures, and in any case the Hungarian long sentence is a dubious formation because the words do not have genders and the subordinate clauses are more uncertainly connected to the main clauses than in the reassuring rigor of a Satzbau (German sentence construction). Such sentences totter along, uncertain even of themselves, stammer a little; in short are extremely lovable.” Does Esterházy’s description fit your own conception of your long ecstatic sentences?

LK: No, I don’t think that means anything to me. Esterházy is probably thinking of certain 19th-century Hungarian writers, or of a particular kind of writer, I can’t tell, but what he says certainly doesn’t apply to Hungarian literature as a whole and not at all to the Hungarian language in general: it is particularly untrue of my own way with sentences. It seems to me that this definition reflects his own literary practice and that the generalization that follows from it is only natural. If I go on to consider my “ecstatically long sentences,” at first nothing particular comes to mind. Then, on reconsideration, I suspect that these long ecstatic sentences have no relation to theory or to any idea I might have about the Hungarian language, or indeed any language, but are the direct products of the “ecstatic” heroes of my books, that they proceed directly from them. It is not me but they who serve as narrators behind the book. I myself am silent, utterly silent in fact. And since that is the case I can hear what these heroic figures are saying, my task then being simply to transcribe them. So the sentences in question are really not mine but are uttered by those in whom some wild desire is working, the desire being that those to whom they address their sentences should understand them correctly and unconditionally. That desire lends their speeches a mad urgency. The urgency is the style. And one more thing: the speeches these heroes are so desperate to rattle off are not the book, not in the least! The book is a medium, a vehicle for their speeches. They are so convinced of the overwhelming importance of what they have to say, that their language is intended to produce a magical effect without necessarily carrying a concrete meaning: it is an embodiment of the ecstasy of persuasion by magic, the momentum of the desire for understanding.

TM: Your work first gained an audience in the English-speaking world filtered through your longtime collaborator Béla Tarr, whose 450-minute version of Satantango became a semi-fixture on the festival circuit in the 1990s. If you push and stretch the sentence to absolute extremes, Tarr does the same with the long take. The observation is so obvious, I’m sure thousands of others have already made it, but do you yourself see a connection between this aspect of Tarr’s methods and yours? Have your novels transformed in any direct way as a result of your collaboration with Tarr? Do you visualize them in your head in anyway filtered through Tarr’s style?

LK: My feeling is that those who love Tarr’s films don’t see it quite like that. A writer doesn’t need anything to write a book, he is completely alone and it’s good that it should be so. A director on the other hand can’t make a film without others. How does this work with Tarr? Because no one has really spoken about this, and it’s unlikely that anyone will, let me do so now and say that Tarr’s cinema changed from the time he met me and we started working together to make our first film. The cause of this radical change was the effect of reading my work, in particular of reading Satantango, getting to understand my vision, my way of thinking, my style. In all the big stories, and in every serious collaboration, someone has to be the initiator, the source from which work flows and in this case it was me, I was the source; in other words it was my vision that decided what kind of films we would make together. The films Tarr made before me were “honest,” that was their strength, it was what characterized them — it was why I, for example, liked them so much. I liked the fact that in these early films of his the single task of the central character was not to lie, that they would not lie — it was the solitary basis for the aesthetic of the films which were a particular form of documentary. Tarr employed amateur actors, or the kind of actor he could torture on camera until he or she spoke the truth. When we met in 1985, Tarr suddenly discovered what he had been desperately seeking and which he very much needed: the only literary material he could possibly work with, the only possible style, the only visual world and dramaturgy, the only appropriate visual rhythm, in other words an artistic vision, spirit and corpus. From this point on everything was suddenly simple. I gave him everything, all I knew, body and soul, really everything, and despite all this he created an absolutely original cinema, something utterly authentic, a form of art quite different from mine. I willingly gave my heart to helping him and now, looking back at these works, these collaborations between myself and Tarr — Tarr’s work — I must say that I almost like the results, that Tarr’s cinema is the only cinema I can really tolerate. There was never any question in these collaborations as to who would make the film. We called them Tarr’s films — it is Tarr who went to the movie festivals and still does, and will as long as he lives: it is right that Tarr should wear the crown, the rest of us who worked with him, and particularly me, we are anonymous in this happy set of events and that is as it should be. Only one thing matters, Tarr’s cinema itself — the others, the sources of the inspiration, the cast, are all unimportant. Making films isn’t a matter of fairness. And that too is as it should be.

TM: The doctor in Satantango fears the loss of memory of any detail that passes his perception as a sign of mortality. “To ignore the apparently insignificant was to admit that one was condemned to sit defenseless on the parapet connecting the rising and falling members of the bridge between chaos and comprehensible order.” There follows a humorous passage in which he lists the things he must remember. But to remember so much of either the important or the insignificant leads to paralysis and a different kind of death. Does the structure of your novel — the tango that constantly goes back and forth in time — mirror the problems of not being able to forget?

LK: What I can’t forget is the world we have created. Everything is of equal interest in the world except man himself. When I stand on the top of a mountain and look down on the valley, seeing the trees in the distance, the deer, the horses and the stream below, then look up at the sky, the clouds and the birds, it is all perfect and magical right up to the moment that, suddenly and brutally, a human being walks into view. The spectacle I was enjoying from the mountain top is simply ruined. As concerns the structure of my novels I am less certain since I never really think about it. But since you are interested all I can say is that the structure isn’t something I decide but what is generated by the madness and intensity of my characters. Or rather that it is as if someone were speaking behind them, but I myself don’t know who it is. What is certain is that I am afraid of him. But it is he that speaks, and his speeches are perfectly mad. Under the circumstances it is self evident that I have no control over anything. Structure? Controlling the structure? It is he who controls everything, it is the furious speed of his madness that decides it all. And given this fury and madness it is not only impossible to remember anything or even think — the only recourse is forgetting.

TM: At first, I imagined you were making Esti into an archetype of the wise noble idiot. That was until, a few pages later, she commits a particularly savage act. Were you deliberately rewriting this archetype and playing with reader’s moral expectations? Oddly enough, I still found her the most sympathetic and tragic figure in the book.

LK: Estike (her name derives from the original word “este” meaning “evening” but in translation it is Esti) is a very important figure. There is a point at which this consequence can easily turn to cruelty. And that is the case here. Please don’t think that the tenderness of this wise, noble idiot is so easy to bear. Spending time with Estike is like spending time with a being of infinite purity. Purity is dangerous. The construction of purity has very important consequences. Estike’s purity stems from the fact that she is a victim. And a victim is always desperately rational in victimhood. It is very dangerous being with a victim. I love her so much I feel physical pain whenever I think of her.

TM: The dance that forms the structure of Satantango and the Werckmeister Harmonies that form the focal point of The Melancholy of Resistance suggest a desire for rhythmic order. I thought I could hear an echo of this rhythm in Szirtes’ translation. This may be an odd question, but do you write with music in the background? And if so, what music?

LK: No, I write my texts, my sentences, in my head — outside there is a terrible, almost unbearable noise, inside there is a terrible, almost unbearable, pounding silence.

TM: Finally, American readers will surely make comparisons between Satantango and Faulkner’s novels. There are the long, rhythmic sentences. There is the small dying town cursed by a past and the constant jarring shifts in time. Did Faulkner’s novels, either in English or Hungarian translation, or any of our other writers inform your work?

LK: Yes, they had an extraordinary effect on me and I am glad I have the opportunity of admitting this to you now. The influence of Faulkner — particularly of As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury — struck an incredibly deep echo in me: his passion, his pathos, his whole character, significance, the rhythmical structure of his novels, all carried me away. I must have been about 16-18, I suppose, at one’s most impressionable years. What else? I was an enthusiastic reader of magnificent Dostoevsky, of the mysterious Ezra Pound, of Thoreau’sWalden, and of Nathanael West’sMiss Lonelyhearts — the list could be infinitely extended. I couldn’t have existed without great writers and for me these writers constituted greatness. The fact is I can’t exist without great writing even now, and that is why it is so important, as I am slowly realizing, that I inhabit the same planet as, thank God, Thomas Pynchon…

My childhood journals are creepy. I would fly into rages about things. When I’m reading myself as a kid, I think, ugh, maybe that’s why I don’t like kids, because I didn’t like myself as a kid. What a little brat I was.